The Wolves link to the tragic Bradford City fire 40 years on from the Valley Parade disaster

The club was in turmoil. A year later they nearly went out of business. Again.

Fans among the crowd of 9,543 had once again travelled with very little hope and even less expectation.

But it was a final day of the season when, throughout the country, football was ultimately of very little consequence.

Because 40 miles east, across from Lancashire into Yorkshire, Bradford City were ready to welcome Lincoln for a promotion party, a Third Division title-winning party, which would see them swap places with Wolves and head into the league above for the first time in nearly half a century.

There was a carnival atmosphere around Valley Parade as fans old and young gathered for one of those special footballing days, rare and cherished days which remain forever etched in the memory bank.

And then, tragedy.   

Five minutes before half time, a fire broke out in the Main Stand.  A discarded cigarette end had fallen underneath the floorboards into the mass of rubbish and debris which had built up below.  A combination of the wooden structure, and strong winds, saw the Stand quickly engulfed in flames.  Within four minutes, and less than an hour after the fans had gleefully hailed the presentation of the Third Division trophy, the Stand had been pretty much destroyed. Devastatingly, 56 people would lose their lives.

Football would never be the same again.  Footage of the fire was transmitted on World of Sport and Grandstand barely minutes after the event.  And yet, in the pre-internet era of no mobile phones and no social media, many of the Wolves fans watching their team’s demise were completely unaware of the catastrophe unfolding just a short car journey away.

“In those days, unless someone had a radio at the football, you didn’t know what was going on elsewhere,” recalls Charlie Daw, a lifelong Wolves fan who was then in his mid-twenties.

“The first we heard about what had happened was on the coach on the way home, and the reaction then was just shock.

“Then you got home and saw the pictures on TV and it was just horrendous – it hadn’t been a great season for Wolves but football just didn’t matter anymore compared to that.”

By the cruellest of ironies, the Stand was scheduled to have its wooden terracing replaced by concrete less than 48 hours later.  It just needed to get through one final afternoon.

The 40th anniversary of the Bradford Fire was marked recently at their last home game of the season against Fleetwood, and then again with the annual memorial service in the city’s Centenary Square on the actual date on Sunday.

There were several players at Valley Parade that day who would later go on and turn out for Wolves.

Don Goodman was then an 18-year-old striker who had enjoyed a really successful first year as a professional with Bradford, but would lose a friend in the fire.  Whilst admitting the painful memories and thinking about those who passed away will never leave him, it’s understandably not a subject he has been keen to talk about over the years.

Micky Holmes, also on Bradford’s books at the time, had been watching the game from the Stand, before decamping to the players’ bar and then jumping out of the window to reconvene with other players to try and process events in a nearby pub.

For Peter Withe, who had earlier spent two years at Wolves towards the start of a career which would see him score the winner for Aston Villa in a European Cup final, he was plying his trade blissfully unaware that several members of his family were at risk.

Withe was playing for Villa, then managed by Graham Turner, who lost 2-1 against his native Liverpool at Anfield, with Paul Birch grabbing their goal after coming off the bench to replace Tony Daley.

But his brother Chris was playing for Bradford, and their parents Gerry and Kathleen had gone along to join the party at Valley Parade.

“It was difficult to find out any sort of information back then, and you would have to pick a lot of it up on the grapevine,” Peter recalled this week, from his home in Australia.

“It was a testing time, and obviously you are panicking a little bit, hoping that everyone is alright.

“I’d seen the pictures on the television, and eventually I spoke to Chris on the phone, who told me everything that had gone on.